Abstract: Rarely does such a consistent and self-contained collection of representational material offer itself unto analysis like the short-lived hood film cycle of the early 1990s.  Rarer still, is the foundational structure of such a symbolic collection completely overlooked by its critics. Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton 1991) and Menace II Society (Allen and Albert Hughes 1993) are the hood film cycle’s most renowned and successful films, as well as its most representative. Spike Lee’s classic Do the Right Thing (1989) can be seen as the hood film’s precursor, while Clockers (1995) marks its end by self-consciously examining the genre’s conventions. Over twenty similarly themed films were released between 1991 and 1995 all united, for the most part, by largely African-American creative talent, contemporary urban settings, a strong intermedial connection to youth rap/hip hop culture, and a thematic focus on inner-city social and political issues such as poverty, crime, racism, drugs and violence. All critical considerations of these films in terms of genre and classification miss its fundamental core: the melodramatic mode, centered around the experience of being “another victim of the ghetto.”

In Bourdieuian terms, mapping this cycle of films and their hitherto undiscovered melodrama will also reveal that the hood film cycle not only embodies and expresses a particular class habitus – “the internalized form of class condition and of the conditioning it entails” (1984: 101) – but (melo)dramatizes the very production of this habitus, particularly with its primary focus on coming-of-age story lines and a youth audience. The realization of such a melodramatic habitus will unfold in two parts: mapping the melodramatic mode onto a previously unconsidered genre – the hood film cycle of the early 1990s, the melo-ghetto – and then analyzing the significance of what amounts to be the melodrama of the map.  Plotting the melodramatic mode onto such a disparate and seemingly incompatible genre such as the hood film should explicate the geography of the melodramatic mode, showcasing its fundamental characteristics and concerns. Witnessing its application in such a violent and ‘masculine’ genre as the hood film should also prove the versatility of the melodramatic mode. Following this structuralist task, this new melodramatic incarnation will be explored in terms of its evolution of the melodramatic mode, demonstrating the ways in which melodrama is continuously reinvented and redefined. With the hood film, a key shift occurs: the home – a crucial concern in melodrama – becomes the hood, and it requires abandonment.  Intimately connected to this disfigured sense of space is another, often overlooked concern of melodrama: the melos. Music in the hood film, and intermediality more generally, is of central importance in mediating the spatial and temporal logic of the hood. With the hood film, melodrama is put in service of a far more serious concern than its traditional domestic or soap-opera utilization: the socio-political crisis in the African-American urban community.

Book Description: Since the 1990s, popular culture the world over has frequently looked to the ’hood for inspiration, whether in music, film, or television. Habitus of the Hood explores the myriad ways in which the hood has been conceived—both within the lived experiences of its residents and in the many mediated representations found in popular culture. Using a variety of methodologies including autoethnography, textual studies, and critical discourse analysis, contributors analyze and connect these various conceptions.

In case I didn’t know I was in the right place:

Simpsons creator Matt Groening makes transformational gift to TFT

Abstract: Nearly all of Steven Soderbergh’s work can be seen to exhibit a large degree of intertextual and intermedial reworking: from remakes that function more as remixes (The Underneath, Solaris, Ocean’s Eleven) and adaptations that bear little resemblance to their source material (King of the Hill, Kafka, Traffic) to borrowed characters (Jackie Brown’s Ray Nicolette in Out of Sight) and borrowed films (Poor Cow in The Limey).  His ‘experimental’ fare makes this penchant for intertextuality explicit with the recurring motif of a a ‘film-within-a-film’ function (sex, lies and videotape, Schizopolis, Full Frontal), while Bubble’s day-and-date release strategy in theatre, on television, and on DVD can be seen as a sort of ‘industrial intermediality.’  With The Good German, Soderbergh employs his intertextual preoccupation in the service of re-investigating a dark page in American history.  While the technical grandiosity of the film – 1940s-era equipment, including black-and-white cinematography, fixed lenses, rear-projection, swipe cuts, 4:3 ratio, and archival footage – was largely written-off by critics as an empty pastiche of film noir style, a closer inspection reveals that this retrograde stylistic practice – this blend of history – is an integral component of the film’s political and philosophical resonance.

 For Soderbergh, investigating history requires investigating how we record history, what we designate as reference points, and what mediums stand in our way.  In order to ‘correct’ history – in this case, the American postwar employment of scientists that should have been tried for war crimes, as well as larger themes of collective guilt, hypocrisy, and moral compromise – Soderbergh requires us to revisit and revise not just the past, but the mediated past.  The Good German is a labyrinthine mix of history, both political and cinematic; it ‘blends’ an array of intertextual and intermedial sources into an uneasy and unsettling fusion.  Rather than simply re-telling history – even a forgotten or suppressed history – The Good German engages with history and its inherent mediation in a dialogic relationship; by confronting us with a brazen intertextual history, The Good German remains a sober reminder that there is a heavy price for unquestioned mediation.

Anime is a visual enigma. Its otherworldly allure and burgeoning popularity across the globe highlights its unique ability to be more than just another type of animation. Originally a novelty export from post-war Japan, anime has now become a subtle yet important part of Western popular culture. Furthermore, it remains a key area of audience and fan research that crosses all generations – children, teenagers, and adults. From Osamu Tezuka to Hayao Miyazaki, Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), anime’s extraordinary characters and oneiric content still enable it to be regarded as one of the most awe-inspiring visual spectacles going into and during the twenty-first century…

- Editor’s Note

For this issue I was a member of the editorial board, and helped with the web and layout editing, but this was officially my last issue of Cinephile with which I was involved, marking an end to 5 years, 7 issues, and countless hours helping shape Cinephile into the feisty little journal it is today. A whole new cohort of graduate students has enthusiastically taken the journal into their very capable hands, and I couldn’t be more proud of the journal.

Check it out at cinephile.ca

Horror cinema has always held a strange place in the mainstream. On one hand, it is reviled by the moral majority and seen as a tool for corrupting impressionable youth, and on the other, it is a source of ritual enjoyment bound up in nostalgic memories of drive-in theatres and Saturday night viewings with friends. Perhaps it is this dichotomy that makes horror films such a guilty pleasure for so many of us; despite their often misogynistic and gruesome elements, they’re just so damn enjoyable on the most basic of levels. This issue of Cinephile explores the ways that more recent horror films have attempted to break free of established conventions and mirrored elements of their own cultural surroundings, and attempts to explain some of the shifts these films have taken in modernizing and localizing horror’s tropes.

- Editor’s Note

I am happy to say I was barely involved with this issue — apart from advising — as my tenure at Cinephile is sadly coming to an end.

Check it out at cinephile.ca

More info at Rodopi | Amazon | Worldcat

Through the prisms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, French Minority Cinema explores key questions of identity and social interaction in the context of republican France, across two significant ‘minority’ cinemas:cinéma de banlieue and gay cinema. It offers the first comprehensive parallel study of these two bodies of film and their inter-relations, examining issues of national cinema and identity and the problematic status of minorities within the contemporary Republic. Against a backdrop of political and media debates on the PACS, parity, the affaire du voile and the French principle of laïcité, banlieue youth dissatisfaction, and gay parenting, French Minority Cinema charts the negotiatory discourse that has emerged through, and around, a core corpus of films released over the past two decades. This study will be of interest to scholars and students alike, working in the fields of French, Film, and Gay and Lesbian/Queer Studies.

Even with a relatively innocuous theme such as ‘Sound on Screen,’ by some sick serendipity Cinephile still ended up with bold art and essays about suicidal families, occult a/synchrony, and ominous sounds eliciting apocalyptic dread. Such is our habit: taking a relatively straightforward and inoffensive topic and vomiting all over it. Nevertheless, our academic aim is sincere in contributing to what is perhaps the most underappreciated and undeveloped area in film studies. This is not to discount what precious little theory does exist on film sound; our objective is to advance from this base in exciting new directions. Hence our enthusiasm to announce these six original pieces with a loud “blaaaarrrgh!”

- Editor’s Note

I was the web and layout editor once again, as well as a member of the editorial board.

Check it out here: cinephile.ca

More info at Rodopi | Amazon | Worldcat

Bruce Lee is a complex and contradictory figure, and it’s a formidable task to take on the multiple facets of his legacy – fighter, film star, philosopher, nationalist, multiculturalist, innovator.  With an approach as multidisciplinary and iconoclastic as Lee’s approach to martial arts, Bowman provides an original and exhilarating account of Lee as ‘cultural event’.  No one has done a better job of explaining why the martial arts ‘legend’ remains such an important and provocative figure.

Leon Hunt (Brunel University), author of Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger.

There are certain scenes which have the power to enthral, provoke, and delight—our cover captures one such titillating tableau. But what gives such a scene the ability to stand apart, to take on a life of its own? What is it about Robert De Niro’s “Are you talking to me?” scene that has such lasting cultural resonance? How does Gene Kelly dancing in the rain embody an entire ethos of escapism?

Continue reading the Editor’s Note

Each essay in this issue focuses on a single scene, and an embedded video clip of the scene under analysis is included.  Brenda Austin-Smith looks at Alice in the Cities, Murray Pomerance considers Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and Elena del Río includes her own short film in the Forward to the issue: What a Scene Can Do,  Other essays look at the Snuff Coda, Eastern Promises, That 70s Sequence, the Post-Mortem Western, and Joy Division and the Televised Performance Scene.

I was the web and layout editor once again, as well as a member of the editorial board.

Abstract: The Museum is a theoretical model that aims to render a media-saturated world in which our media have become saturated with media. Corporate conglomeration of the cultural industries has transformed the production and circulation of art; the Museum captures the inter-related complexities of this development in which the notion of a singular text breaks down in the wake of synergistic proliferation. Conceiving of this ‘new society’ requires new conceptions: a model (the Museum), a language (polytextuality), a discipline (cultural economy), and a product (the textwork). Section I establishes the ‘Geography of the Museum’, starting with its chief architect, André Malraux, who designs the neo-aesthetic foundation of the ‘Imaginary Museum’ (Chapter Three). The post-structural blueprints are then drawn up by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, giving the Museum its polytextual essence (Chapter Four). The Museum is then physically erected by the conglomerated cultural industries, transforming the Imaginary Museum into a material consumer experience (Chapter Five). Section II turns to the ‘Display of the Museum’, cataloguing the different ways in which art manifests itself within the Museum. By way of Roland Barthes, the textwork is theorized, a dialogical designation for the type of networked cultural output that now dominates popular culture (Chapter Seven). Case studies of particularly illuminating textworks are then presented, illustrating the polytextual content of the Museum in a multitude of intersecting forms and mediums. A decisively polytextual museum exhibition, “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”, as well as two films – Children of Men and V for Vendetta – are seen as literal embodiments of the Museum (Chapter Eight). The next textwork is concerned with intermedial structure, and focuses on the Wu-Tang Clan’s interpolation of certain cinematic genres, as well as other mediums (Chapter Nine). The final textwork is General Electric, the world’s largest conglomerate. Transformers and 30 Rock, two very different GE products, both explicitly exhibit corporate synergy through polytextuality (Chapter Ten). Over-arching cultural shifts are demonstrated by the Museum: access over ownership, circulation over distribution, dialogue over delivery, digital social text over authorship, and multiple over singular.